Eshmor
"The yellow-spotted more savage variant of their species, these Eeshmor are far too chaotic to be allowed within civilized places." The moray in them gives a mouth that expands to take a whole body, and the rest of what they are known for is the spawning. Every Eesha lays into a corpse. The Eshmor found that a living one works better.
"They can shred the skin on a person's back and burrow up to their brain with little invasion to the rest of their body, and then lay a dozen eggs at the base of their temple. They eventually grow and become far too noticeable, and the person is condemned to die and eventually is weighed down by the eggs and dies." The living host is a Bed that walks, kept warm and kept moving, and it is the most efficient spawning the species has found. Five feet, seldom upright.
Body
Five feet, yellow-spotted, and low to the ground. The mouth is the species' two sets of jaws taken to the moray's extreme: the outer distends far past the width of the head and the inner runs forward on muscle and drags back, and between them they take a body whole rather than in pieces. Nothing in an Eshmor chews. Everything is pulled.
They are seldom upright. The hips of the species were a poor joint to begin with and the Eshmor simply does not bother with them, working along the ground and through water in the way the frame was actually built for. The skin is bare and must stay wet, and in a foul backwater it does.
Life
The spawning is what the kin is for, in the eyes of everyone who has to live near one. A Bed in the ordinary Eesha sense is a corpse, opened, weighted, sunk and marked by scent so that other Eesha know it is claimed, and the clutch that reaches the water is the part that ate most. An Eshmor's Bed breathes. The eggs go in at the base of the temple, the host goes on walking, and the clutch grows in a body that carries itself to food and keeps itself warm.
The host dies of the weight. It becomes noticeable first, and then it is condemned, and then the eggs finish it. What hatches out goes through the same Leaf stage as any Eesha: a flat, transparent, leaf-shaped larva the length of a hand, drifting, eating anything soft, until the colouring comes on and it goes by smell to the nearest pit.
Regard
They are barred from civilised places and the bar is not much argued with. The Eshmor are also the parasite that specialises in their own people: Eshmor eggs will hatch in an Eesha as readily as in anyone, and the pits keep a watch on the back of the neck, and a senior Eesha found carrying them is killed at once by its inferiors, who have been waiting for a reason.
That is the whole of the Eshmor's standing among their kin. They are the reason an Eesha looks at another Eesha's neck.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How long a host lives once the eggs are laid
- Whether an Eshmor chooses its host or takes whatever it catches
- Which backwaters they hold, and how close to settled country
- Whether an infested Eesha has ever been cleared rather than killed